Posted by Bálint Miklós, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog.)

With the holidays approaching and emails coming in at a furious pace, we can all use a little help. Inbox is already on hand assisting you with the next step, organizing your trips, and even suggesting reminders.

But when you're checking email on the go, it can be cumbersome and time-consuming to reply to all or even some of them. What if there was a way for your inbox to guess which emails can be answered with a short reply, prepare a few responses on your behalf and present them to you, one tap away?

Well, starting later this week, Inbox will do just that with Smart Reply.

Smart Reply suggests up to three responses based on the emails you get. For those emails that only need a quick response, it can take care of the thinking and save precious time spent typing. And for those emails that require a bit more thought, it gives you a jump start so you can respond right away.

There's actually a lot going on behind the scenes to make Smart Reply work. Inbox uses machine learning to recognize emails that need responses and to generate the natural language responses on the fly. If you're interested in how Smart Reply works, including how researchers got machine learning to work on a data set that they never saw, you can read more about it on the Google Research Blog.

And much like how Inbox gets better when you report spam, the responses you choose (or don't choose!) help improve future suggestions. For example, when Smart Reply was tested at Google, a common suggestion in the workplace was "I love you." Thanks to Googler feedback, Smart Reply is now SFW :)

Smart Reply will be rolling out later this week on both Google Play and the App Store in English. If you've got a lot of emails on your plate, now's a great time to try Inbox and get through them faster than ever.

Posted by Alex Gawley, Director of Product Management, Gmail and Inbox by Gmail

Have you ever felt like your inbox was someone else’s to-do list? Requests, project updates and action items stream in all day. You move between your computer and the phone in your pocket to try to manage, and instead of focusing on the most important things, you find yourself focusing on the most recent things. No matter the device, email should feel like a time saver, but instead it feels like a chore.

This is why we created Inbox by Gmail, to help you focus on the things that matter to you. Since we launched five months ago, one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve received is that Google Apps customers want access to Inbox at work. That’s why we're excited to kick off the next phase of our journey: collaborating with you to bring Inbox to work.

Even before the first invitations went out to use Inbox for your own email, Googlers have been using it to get more done at work. Whether it’s snoozing the expense report notification until after the big presentation, or adding a reminder to schedule lunch with a favorite client, Inbox helps put email on your terms. And since Inbox was built on the same infrastructure as Gmail, it meets the same high security standards you expect from email.

Of course, every company and every person is different, so we want to get more input on how Inbox will work at your company. Starting next month, we’ll begin enabling Inbox for a small group of Google Apps customers to learn about their needs, challenges and use cases.

• Do you want to use Inbox as your primary email at work?
• Are employees at your company heavy mobile users?
• Most importantly, do you want to partner with Google on user studies to help build the new work Inbox?

If you answered “yes, yes and yes!” then email inboxforwork@google.com from your Google Apps for Work administrator account to apply for an invitation to the early adopter program. To start, we plan to work very closely with the early adopter companies, so not everyone that applies will be accepted right away, but the program will continue to expand over the coming months.

Inbox wasn’t created to reinvent email, Inbox was created to help you reinvent the way you get things done. This means we need to understand more about how things get done (or don’t) today. And with your feedback, who knows, we could reinvent the way people work.

Note: Only the Google Apps administrator can apply for entry to the Inbox for work early adopter program.